How to screen capture a region to GIF using Byzanz

Byzanz can be used to screen capture and save it to an animated GIF file. To capture a region of the display, you can pass it the XY coordinates of the top-left corner of the region and the width and height of the region. A more intuitive method would have been to draw a region on the display and have Byzanz capture that.

Thanks to Rob W, you can do that using his Bash script byzanz-record-region, which can be found here. Getting this to work takes a few steps:

Create a Bash script file from the source code for byzanz-record-region available here.

That is it! To record or screen capture a region of the display for 10 seconds, just invoke the script without any parameters:

$ byzanz-record-region

Your mouse cursor turns into a cross-hair. Draw the region on the display. A countdown of 10 seconds is shown followed by a beep. Recording begins and ends after 10 seconds. You can find the resulting animated GIF file in /tmp/recorded.gif.

To provide a different duration of recording or filename, you need to provide both parameters (even if you only need to change one of them):